Finally...

It's over. The election is done. No more TV ads. No more street corners filled with signs. No more debate about vice presidential choices, wardrobes (heck, I'd take $150k to shop at Neiman Marcus and Saks!), health, race, or age. Now, we can focus our attention for a few months on more important things - the economy, the war, whether or not your taxes will increase, and how to fix everything else. I say a few months because that's when the media will start suggesting who MIGHT run in 2012. I live in NH, and I'll bet $100 that a potential candidate will visit my state before June.

I only have one other comment about the election. In my town, we vote by paper ballot - you know, fill in the little circles with a black marker. When I arrive at the polls, there are a number of workers waiting to "check me in". I give them my last name, they look me up in their little book, cross me off, and hand me a ballot. I don't have to present a voter registration card (like I did when I lived in Charlotte County, FL), and I don't have to show ID. This year, there was another row of workers sitting behind those with the registration books. They had duplicate copies of the books and monitored what the primary checker-offer was doing. So, whoopee! My name was crossed off in two books instead of one. Think about what could go wrong here.

If I wanted to cheat, it might be easy to guess which of my acquaintances in town might not vote, or might be out of town. I could walk in a second time with a baseball cap on and tell them my acquaintance's name, and no one would probably notice that I had voted 30 minutes earlier under another name. Or I could look up names in the phone book and just present myself as Mrs. So-and-So early in the day to get another vote in. Imagine Mrs. So-and-So's surprise when she shows up at the polls a few minutes or hours later only to be told she had already voted! I've often wondered what would happen in this case?

Because it's a small NH town, we citizens get to vote on EVERYTHING - whether we should buy a new firetruck, hire a new French teacher for the middle school, or change the setback rules for swimming pools. (Remember Newhart and the town meetings?) There have been many issues in the last decade that have been decided by just a few votes. It wouldn't be hard to change some of those outcomes. With all the scandal around elections the last few rounds, you'd think there'd be a better system.